Robert Charles Wilson Quotes (134 quotes)

Works

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Robert Charles Wilson

Spin

Robert Charles Wilson

The Chronoliths

Robert Charles Wilson

Darwinia

Robert Charles Wilson

Blind Lake

Robert Charles Wilson

Axis

Robert Charles Wilson

Bios

Robert Charles Wilson

Vortex

Robert Charles Wilson

Memory Wire

Robert Charles Wilson

A Bridge of Years

Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson: 134 quotes 2 likes

Famous Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

“We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Variant: Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.
Source: Spin (2005), p. 438

“I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 15 (p. 136)

“What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 327)

“You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you're afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you're like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Observer (p. 111)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

“The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 13 (p. 156)

““Don’t tell me. It changed your life.” I was smiling.
She smiled back. “It didn’t even change my mind.””

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 180)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes about life

“The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 20 (p. 179)

“Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 25 (p. 194)

“There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 16 (p. 142)

“The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 25 (p. 209)

“She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 140)

“Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 140)

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes about time

“Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 1 (p. 16)

“We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 19 (p. 235)

“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”
“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”
“I think it’s called acceptance.”
Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees.
“Very bleak attitude, Tom.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

“Experience bears it out.”
Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 3 (pp. 52-53)

“What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 11 (p. 177)

“Some pious men may find this truth unorthodox and bitter:
But Nature, Chance, and Time ensure survival of the fitter!”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 389

“Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 332

Robert Charles Wilson: Trending quotes

“That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 3 (p. 37)

Death , Parting

“Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 11 (p. 106)

Perfection

“One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Observer (p. 112)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Understanding

Robert Charles Wilson Quotes

“Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 59

Truth , Color

“I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.”

Robert Charles Wilson

The Observer (p. 113)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Understanding

““You think Wexler is lying?”
“I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 2 (p. 20)

Lying , Thinking

“I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 35 (p. 348)

Sense

““Wow,” Sue said. “You actually stole this?”
“We don’t use that word,” Elaine told her. “Chris has an unnamed high-level source.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 20 (p. 238)

“We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 258)

Age , History , Learning , Science

“After a gaudy sunset that land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 8 (p. 80)

God , Indifference

“His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 33 (p. 358)

Idea , Night

“Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 15 (p. 179)

“It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 4 (p. 33)

“He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things…but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 15 (p. 134)

War , Nature

“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 403

Love

“An honest book is almost as good as a friend.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 261

Books

“The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.”

Robert Charles Wilson

Afterword (p. 220)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Imagination , Failure , Universe , Personality

“When does loyalty become martyrdom?”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 19 (p. 240)

Loyalty

“Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 8 (p. 112)

Reading , Personality

“A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 355-356

God , Faith , Patience

“If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I'm also a realist.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 216

“Must be a full moon,” she said.”Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 8 (p. 143)

“His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 377

Faith , Sense

“Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 13 (p. 156)

Children , Lie , Art , Color

“The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 11 (p. 149)

Faith

“Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?”

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 172)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Youth , Science

“If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 7 (p. 69)

“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 200

Truth

“Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 2 (p. 31)

World

“What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Axis

Source: Axis (2007), Chapter 7 (p. 100; repeated on p. 355 at the end of the book)

“His heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 22 (p. 255)

Religion , Law , Heart

“From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 327)

History , Reality , Sense , Universe

“The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 22 (pp. 227-228)

Truth , Question , Problem , Reality

“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 4 (p. 43)

Hate

“You never stop being a parent, Adam, no matter how old or wise your child becomes—you'll see.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 356

Parent

““Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.”

Robert Charles Wilson

Pearl Baby (p. 211)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Secret , Way , Help

“Bloody indeed,” the President said. “But we’re not a nation that flinches at blood, nor are we a people constrained by feminine delicacy. To us all is permitted—even cruelty, yes, even ruthlessness—for we’re the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from bondage. We must not be miserly with blood! Let there be blood, if blood alone can drown the old secular world. Let there be pain, and let there be death, if pain and death will save us from the twin tyrannies of Atheism and Europe.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 247-248 (spoken by the tyrannical president Deklan Comstock)

Death , Pain , People , World

“I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don't know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 217

Justice

“He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 21 (p. 181)

Pain , Thinking

“He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 24 (p. 195)

People

“The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 413 (closing words)

God , Thinking , Sea

““Ah, books.” Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. “They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.””

Robert Charles Wilson

Divided by Infinity (p. 179)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Books , World , Smile

“Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 10 (p. 116)

Dead

“The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 62

World

“Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.”
Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 404

World , History

“Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don’t need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 368

“All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.
Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 340

God , Lie

“I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Spin

Source: Spin (2005), p. 248

Love

“There’s no point living if you can’t, at least occasionally, live.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 18 (p. 224)

“She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.””

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 2 (p. 33)

Understanding

“Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 15 (p. 189)

Courage

“I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 234

Fashion

“I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point?”

Robert Charles Wilson book The Chronoliths

Source: The Chronoliths (2001), Chapter 15 (p. 189)

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